WOSCONET launched its flagship Economic Empowerment Program in January 2025, targeting market traders and small business owners in Enugu's urban and peri-urban communities with a comprehensive package of vocational skills training and financial literacy education. The programme, which ran across four weeks in January, reached 280 women drawn from Ogbete Main Market, Garki Market, New Haven Market, and several community-level trading associations in Enugu North LGA. Participants were identified through WOSCONET's existing community networks and referred by women's cooperative leaders, ensuring that those with the most limited access to formal business development support were prioritised.
The vocational training component offered three skills tracks: tailoring and garment production, soap and cosmetics manufacturing, and food processing and packaging. Each track was facilitated by experienced master trainers who combined technical instruction with business application, ensuring that participants not only acquired a skill but understood how to cost products, price competitively, identify a market, and manage quality. Participants received starter kits relevant to their chosen track — sewing kits, raw materials for soap production, or food processing equipment — provided through a combination of programme funding and in-kind donations from local businesses. By the end of the vocational component, participants had produced saleable items and presented them at a small internal market showcase, receiving feedback from invited buyers and community members.
"Economic empowerment is the surest path out of poverty. When a woman earns, her entire household rises with her."
The financial literacy component, woven through all four weeks of the programme, addressed the specific money management challenges faced by informal sector women traders. Sessions covered basic bookkeeping using simple ledger tools adapted for low-literacy participants, understanding and calculating profit and loss, separating household and business finances, saving strategies including individual and group savings (ajo/esusu), understanding the terms and true costs of different credit products, and navigating microfinance institution loan applications. Participants cited the session on separating business and household finances as particularly transformative, reporting that they had never previously thought of their trading income as a business cash flow to be managed deliberately rather than a general household resource.
WOSCONET partnered with two Enugu-based microfinance banks to provide a streamlined loan application pathway for programme graduates who wished to access credit to expand their businesses. As part of the partnership, loan officers from both institutions conducted an on-site orientation session and committed to processing applications from WOSCONET graduates within an expedited 10-day turnaround, with reduced collateral requirements for first-time borrowers. A follow-up survey conducted three months after the programme's close found that 67 percent of respondents had implemented at least one financial management change from the programme, and 41 had submitted a formal loan application or joined a savings cooperative.
Building on the January programme's success, WOSCONET secured additional funding to expand the Economic Empowerment Program to two more LGAs in the second quarter of 2025, with an enhanced curriculum that includes digital financial services training — covering mobile money, bank transfers, and QR payment acceptance — to equip participants for an increasingly cashless trading environment. The organisation is also developing a peer mentorship structure that would pair successful graduates with incoming cohorts, creating a self-sustaining community of practice that extends the programme's impact beyond each direct training cycle.